Traditionally, voice communications and data communications had been considered to be different kinds of communications, and hence have evolved along different paths. Voice communications systems, and particularly telephone systems, have evolved into very feature-rich systems that offer users a myriad of features such as call forwarding, hunt groups, coverage paths, pickup groups, bridging, etc. But voice communications systems have also evolved into connection-poor systems that generally assume all communications connections to be of a single type or, at best, of one of a very small set of very similar types. Conversely, data communications systems have evolved into feature-poor but connection-rich systems that offer users various transport mechanisms (e.g., circuit-switched, packet-switched, Asynchronous Transfer Mode, SONET, narrow-band, broad-band, local-area network, wide-area network, etc.), media (e.g., facsimile transfers, electronic mail, file transfers, compressed and full-bandwidth video, etc.), and protocols (e.g., StarLAN, Ethernet, Internet, ARPANET, etc.), to name just a few.
In the recent past voice communications and data communications have been converging, so that now both kinds of communications are often provided by the same system. For example, ISDN telephony systems can carry either voice or data in their B channels, and some packet-switching systems handle both packetized voice and data. However, depending on whether the system is fundamentally a voice communications system or a data communications system, the services provided by the system to both the voice communications and the data communications have been either feature-poor and connection-rich, or feature-rich and connection-poor, respectively.
With the advent of multi-media communications and the integration of voice, data, and video communications that multi-media involves, the lack of either a full feature set or a full connection set has become unacceptable. Consequently, the industry is expending tremendous resources in designing new multi-media communications systems that are capable of providing both a variety of features and connections to multi-media communications. But the time and expense involved in the design of these new systems is great, and often prohibitive. Moreover, these systems are not usually compatible with the installed base of voice communications systems and data communications systems, and therefore require the replacement of the existing communications systems as opposed to providing a growth path for expanding the existing systems' capabilities to multi-media.
Hence, what the art requires is a relatively inexpensive and backward-compatible arrangement for providing multi-media services that offers both the feature richness of voice communications systems and the connection richness of data communications systems to all communications types of the multi-media environment.